


Bravery

by gwennolmarie



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Anxiety, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fear, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Near Death Experiences, Night Terrors, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-10-17 09:53:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17558165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwennolmarie/pseuds/gwennolmarie
Summary: “And sometimes bravery means askin’ for help.”





	Bravery

**Author's Note:**

> here's another fucking stupid oneshot because i don't have the mind to work on all the WIPs i have

Dutch had told him when he first joined that he wouldn’t be allowed to participate in trailing for bounties until he was an adult.

His eighteenth had come and gone, but Dutch refused to relent.

So John turned to Arthur, pestered and pleaded until the older man agreed to take him out on the hunt.

He should have listened to Dutch.

\--

There’s something around his throat and his vision is fuzzing, colors dimming.

His chest is half-full of air that’s turning sour and threatening to burst free.

To crack apart his ribs and leave his lungs as wet strips of pink flesh.

There’s a ringing in his ears and all he can think is that after all these years…

All this time and he’ll die the same death he should’ve when he was just a kid.

The pressure around his throat is torn away and he desperately gasps for air.

Chokes and coughs, turning onto his hands and knees as dizzy nausea overwhelms him.

A hand on his back tries to soothe him.

He stares at the growing puddle of blood, trickling night-dark through the blades of grass.

Big hands pull him to his feet.

Get him to stand on legs that don’t quite feel stable.

He looks up and sees Arthur, brow creased with worry.

John feels himself shaking.

Arthur’s hands squeeze his shoulders, the older man leans down to inspect John’s neck.

“That’ll need cleanin’,” Arthur murmurs.

John’s hand lifts to his neck almost involuntarily but Arthur’s hand leaves his shoulder and locks his wrist in place between their chests.

“Don’t touch it, you’ll just get dirt in it,” Arthur grumbles.

Squeezes John’s wrist like a warning.

Backs away.

John watches, feeling numb to the world, as Arthur grimaces and pushes the toe of his boot into the body on the ground.

“Guess we ain’t gettin’ that money,” John chokes out.

Every syllable hurts and his hands drop to his sides, shake, restlessly twitch and then come back up so he can cross his arms over his chest.

Like it could keep the world away from him.

Arthur’s frown is clear with unspoken disappointment.

He nudges the body one last time with his boot then huffs, annoyance and the feeling of being cheated.

Arthur searches the body.

They mount their horses and ride back to camp, only a couple dollars in coins to show for their troubles.

John does not touch his throat.

\--

Arthur reports to Dutch, sparing John having to face their leader’s ire at the two of them going behind his back.

John waits, as instructed, in Arthur’s tent.

Arthur comes back with some medical supplies near-spilling out of his satchel and a wash bucket.

John washes his hands, struggles to wash the flayed skin of his throat.

He’d had rope burn on his palms and fingers before.

Your instinct when a horse spooks, sadly, isn’t to let go of the lead, it’s to hold on.

Thinking for a split-second that you can help, you can grab it tightly and stop that horse from darting away, and maybe never coming back.

Uselessly your hands curl into fists around the rough ropes but that does nothing.

If you had calluses before the friction rips them from you.

Undoes any hard work that built them in a fraction-of-a-second.

And hands heal quicker than the soft skin of a neck.

Arthur grumbles and tells John to lift up his hair.

John can’t think enough to protest.

He doesn’t fight Arthur cleaning the wound.

Bites down the hisses and groans of pain.

Bites so hard into his tongue that the taste of blood fills his mouth and all he can do is close his eyes and swallow.

“Now it’s clean I’m thinkin’ it might be better to leave it open,” Arthur quirks his mouth to the side in contemplation, running damp fingertips against the edges of the wound.

Where in the next few days the skin will dry, shrink and surely be torn away.

John was never the kind who could leave his scabs _be_.

He slowly opens his eyes and shifts from sitting on his knees to sitting on his ass with his legs awkwardly splayed to one side.

It forces Arthur’s touch to leave him.

“Lemme go put this shit back,” Arthur grunts as he rises to his feet.

Exits the tent.

John’s never known such an _itch_.

Such a powerful desire to go against orders.

He wants to clutch at his own throat, make sure that rope ain't there.

Even though he knows he’s breathing, in and out.

In and out.

He still feels like he’s being choked.

John unhooks his suspenders and untucks his shirt just to grip at the fabric.

Clenches and twists the cotton to have _something_.

Anything in his hands but his own throat.

Arthur slips back into the tent and levels John with an amused look.

“Gettin’ comfortable, Marston?”

He gets no reply.

Arthur frowns and reaches a leg out to nudge one of John’s.

No different than he nudged the corpse of the man that almost took John’s life from him.

Only to have Arthur save him, again.

It always seemed to be Arthur saving him.

“Thanks,” John croaks out, not looking up from the threadbare hem of his button-down.

“Nah… S’not a big deal,” Arthur says awkwardly.

And it shouldn’t be.

John knows he shouldn’t make such a big _fucking_ deal out of it.

He stares blankly at the blue threads escaping their orderly patterns.

“Or… Is it?” Arthur asks quietly.

In a voice that’s too understanding.

Softer than John deserves when he feels this stupid.

This weak.

Maybe Dutch had known, had been trying to protect him from himself.

John’s throat gurgles but can’t quite find words to express his emotions.

He hears Arthur shift and then fully come into the tent, move behind John and sit on his bedroll.

John hears the turning of pages, the scratch of pen on paper.

John watches the way the light seeping through the tent warms, tints the blue of his shirt purple, and then cools again.

Colors dimming.

John had never felt scared of the dark before, not in so many words.

What lurks in the dark? Sure.

He’d be stupid not to fear the unknown.

As the world outside grows darker he feels more and more scared.

Thinks that somehow, the dark will close in on him and never lift again.

Arthur’s boot nudges the back of his hip.

“You gonna go to yours?” Arthur asks.

“You remember… When y’all first picked me up?” John asks hoarsely.

“What part?”

“I had nightmares… Because…”

“And you’d sneak into my tent and somehow not wake me, and I wouldn’t know until you were droolin’ on my blanket when I woke up the next mornin’.”

“Yeah.”

“You got somethin’ you’re tryin’ to ask, John?” Arthur’s tone isn’t offended.

If anything it’s indulgent.

“Can I stay here tonight?” John whispers then closes his eyes against the fear of rejection.

Opens them when Arthur huffs.

Not annoyed.

Not cheated.

Not mocking or mean.

Fond, and soft in the way that Arthur always tries to pretend he isn’t.

“You tired now?” The older man asks.

“Yeah,” John admits.

“Come ‘ere, then,” Arthur says.

And John crawls onto the bedroll, lays stretched out alongside Arthur’s leg while the other sits.

John pulls his hair off his neck then pillows his cheek on his arm.

Arthur pokes him in the forehead with the back end of his pen.

“You ever stop havin’ those nightmares?”

“...No,” John stares at the seam of Arthur’s pants.

“But you stopped comin’ to me.”

“You… You had to leave for a few weeks, on some o’ Dutch’s business,” John reaches out and picks at one of the stray threads.

Calling for him to give his fingers something to do.

“I remember…”

“You came back real angry and… You drank,” John murmurs, “I don’t blame you, but you wasn’t the same and I didn’t want to bother you.”

Arthur doesn’t respond, puts away his journal.

John loses his grip on the thread when Arthur shuffles down and lays flat on his back next to John.

“I got over that patch pretty quickly, but you never tried again,” Arthur murmurs towards the ceiling of the tent.

“They didn’t _stop_ but they… They stopped happenin’ every night, every week, even,” John shrugs awkwardly with the shoulder not under him.

“I didn’t mean to push you away,” Arthur grumbles.

“I know,” John whispers.

Spots a stray thread in the seam that rests over Arthur’s shoulder.

Gets it between finger and thumb.

Twists and untwists.

Arthur glances at him, at John’s hands, in amusement.

“Shouldn’t need to, anyway,” John says, barely louder than breathing.

But Arthur hears him.

“It ain’t a bad thing, to need help,” Arthur murmurs.

Yawns.

“You never need it,” John says, “I ain’t never seen you scared.”

“You think bravery’s going into a fight, straightfaced, and coming out without ever fearing you’d lose,” Arthur says.

John doesn’t argue, the older man is right.

“That ain’t it,” Arthur turns his head to look at the younger man in the fading light, “Bravery ain’t not fearing, it’s not letting that fear consume you.”

John hesitantly meets the older man’s eyes to see the insistence in Arthur’s expression when he speaks next.

“And sometimes bravery means askin’ for help.”


End file.
